Dancing Lost Gestures
Sanctuary on the Fault Line Second Cycle
Dancing Lost Gestures is the second cycle of gathering for composting and fortifying together in the fugitive, feminist dance movement Sanctuary on the Fault Line.
Taking place from September 2025 to June 2026 there will be 6 workshops, performances and retreats and a podcast, which will act as a soul friend to all dancers, professional, self professed and hidden who would like to dip their toe, or dive in to the practice of this movement. A movement which unsticks dance from civilised, systemic and conditioned regulation, inviting it to wild space so it can germinate dances that hold and move us otherwise, and spill them among us; a movement woven from running with the wolves feminism, contemporary movement science and re-connection to the non-human world.
There are many lost gestures returning to those who practice this work, and moving like a contagion in their communities and in this cycle we will be making ground for these: deep light, burial, wind, anam cara and river. See the events below and their booking links as these go live. Announcements also going to the Sanctuary on the Fault Line mailing list, when booking opens, write here to join.
Dancing Lost Gestures is visioned, invited and curated by dancer, care taker and instigator or Sanctuary on the Fault Line, Rolfer and musician Hayley J S Matthews. With creation and collaboration from Isadora Duncan legacy dancer and teacher Barbara Kane, dancers Debbie Allen, Rachel Elderkin, Betsy Field, Sara Wookey, Sandra Voulgari, Ella Mesma and Helen Edwards; musicians Marina Avetisian, Jocelyn West and Alistair Simmons; historian of mystics, visionaries and poets Mark Burrows; the Meditateo Centre, London and the London wilds.
Dancing Lost Gestures events
DEEP LIGHT, September 13 -14, 2025 ~ A live performance (13/09) and workshop (14/09), London
Deep Light is a performance and workshop shared by dancers and musicians moving with the deep legacy of dancer Isadora Duncan and the new contemplative, feminist legacy of the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement. You can come to the performance, the workshop, or both. They will bath us in the lost gesture of ‘deep light’. We’ll move with some of Duncan’s choreographies, from a moment in her life when she met a very deep space and found deep support and immense lightness, with Celtic notions of embedded and embodied light, with a new dance and live music piece from the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement and with embodiments of yielding and becoming.
More info and booking soon.
BURIAL, October 29 - 30, 2025: Burial ~ A dancing intervention, London
Burial is a dancing intervention, inviting any dancer or those called to dance, to learn and perform the simple and meaningful choreography of dancer Hayley J S Matthews’ ‘Burial of the (Witches) Women’, made in the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement, and to perform it together in the London wilds in a gift economy. The dance is a ritual that buries the women who were never buried, and never ‘witches’ and calls and celebrates their spirits and lives as healer, body worker, weaver, seer, dancer, sister, mother..back among us. And by doing so repairs the frozen parts in us, and the rupture in the tapestry of the feminine that made a web for all, passed down, body to body, embodied culture to embodied culture by our ancestors who witnessed these women’s persecution. By re-birthing these actions of burial, celebration and acknowledgement that were missed, we bring movement in a flood of dancing that weaves communal recovery. And also connect to the Celtic rite at this time of year, which was never about ghouls but about calling our ancestors to be with us for the year ahead.
Because of the strange nature of this territory, in dance and in women’s lives there is no fee or payment to join as a dancer, but an invitation to public to come and be part, and to contribute through a gift economy for the ritual.
Write here to tell Hayley you’d like to come as dancer or witness and more details will be sent soon.
WIND ~ ROOTING, January 10, 2026 ~ A retreat, online
With dancer Hayley J S Matthews and historian of mystics, visionaries and poets Mark Burrows, more info and booking coming soon.
RIVER, April 26, 2026, 2-4 PM ~ A workshop, Oxford
A workshop with Sanctuary on the Fault Line dancer Helen Edwards. Remembering Earth, movement for staying alive, remembering lost gestures and creating peripheral ecologies. IN Headington Hill Park.
Booking soon, to register your interest write to Helen at hels@bodylogix.co.uk
WIND ~ FLYING, May 2, 2026 ~ A retreat, London
With dancer Hayley J S Matthews and historian of mystics, visionaries and poets Mark Burrows, more info and booking coming soon.
THE ANAM CARA OF THE DANCES OF TOMORROW, THROUGHOUT - an eleven episode podcast, which will be a guide to the Sanctuary on the Fault Line practice. Online. Will be found wherever you get your podcasts and each episode announced to the Sanctuary on the Fault Line mailing list, which you are welcome to request to join here.
If you would like one of these events to come to your community elsewhere, please let me know and let’s see if it is possible